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Noted Journalist Flees NYT

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Article in The Contrarian by Paul Krugman, 1/29/25

Headeline: “Departing the New York Times”

Subhea:  “I left to stay true to my byline”

“As many people reading this know, last month I retired from my position as an opinion writer at the New York Times—a job I had done for 25 years. Despite the encomiums issued by the Times, it was not a happy departure. If you check out my Substack, you will see that I have by no means run out of energy or topics to write about. But from my perspective, the nature of my relationship with the Times had degenerated to a point where I couldn’t stay.”

“. . . (I) believe that the story of why I left says something important about the current state of legacy journalism.”

“. . .I feel sorry about abandoning loyal readers who still rely on legacy media and who may not follow me to Substack. But my situation had become intolerable, and I haven’t felt a moment’s regret over the new direction and recovering my freedom.”

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/departing-the-new-york-times

 

Graduate With Journalism Degree?

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Stephen J. Adler, 1/30/25

Headline:  “Does It Still Make Sense to Be a Journalist?”

Subhead:  “An antidote to perpetual despondency.”

“This is the question I hear most from students and early-career reporters. It is usually posed something like this: ‘Journalism jobs are disappearing. Where they do exist, the pay is low. Even if I work ethically, lots of people won’t trust my reporting—and some may threaten my well-being, online and even in the real world. I worry all this will get worse in Trump’s second term. Have I made a mistake in committing to be a journalist? Should I switch fields now?’ ”

“This is such a painful and difficult question, especially for a journalism professor who has spent his adult life in the news business. . . ”

https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/does-it-still-make-sense-to-be-journalist-adler-finances-turmoil-industry-trust-career.php

Rt. Wing Media & Church Raids

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Episcopal News Service

Article in Media Matters by Noah Howard & Torri Lonergan, 1/29/25

Headline:  “Right-wing media figures defend Trump policy allowing ICE arrests at schools, churches, and hospitals”

Subhead:  “Newsmax host Greg Kelly: ‘Serial killers, a lot of them, are churchgoers’ “.

“Right-wing media figures defend Trump policy allowing ICE arrests at schools, churches, and hospitals

“After President Donald Trump issued new guidance allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to raid ‘sensitive locations’ — including schools, churches, and hospitals — right-wing media jumped to his defense by fearmongering that murderers, gang members, rapists, and pedophiles are hiding out in these spaces. One host defended raids on churches by going so far as to suggest that “serial killers, a lot of them, are churchgoers.’ ”

https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/right-wing-media-figures-defend-trump-policy-allowing-ice-arrests-schools-churches-and

 

Devil’s in the Post

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Article in The New Republic by Jason Linkins, 1/25/25

Headline:  “The Washington Post Commits an Unpardonable January 6 Sin”

Subhead:  “Jeff Bezos’s increasingly meretricious newspaper stooped to publish a pathetic “both-sides” defense of the violent mob that stormed the Capitol.”

“Well, I hate to say I told you so. Back in December, I warned that Donald Trump’s plan to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists was going to be greeted by the media with prewritten takes about how President Biden’s own use of the pardon power justified a decision to free a violent mob. Today, The Washington Post’s editorial board, tasked with the mission of obtaining 200 million paying users while simultaneously following owner Jeff Bezos’s directive to make the venerable newspaper substantially more mendacious, made me look prescient.

“ ‘The outgoing and incoming presidents both abused their pardon powers on Monday, undermining the rule of law and setting dangerous precedents that perpetuate America’s divisions,’ they wrote. . .”

“To put it charitably, this is a bungle from the editorial board. In the first place, the editors demonstrate a real inability to follow cause and effect chains; here asserting that the ‘the trouble’ began with Biden’s preemptive pardons, when the use of the term ‘preemptive’ clearly suggests a precipitating event. In this case, somebody forgot the well-documented history of Donald Trump publicly announcing his plans to persecute members of Biden’s family and administration, over and over again. Just this week, Trump intimated in an interview that he might go after Biden specifically because he wasn’t corrupt enough to pardon himself on the way out the door.”

https://newrepublic.com/post/190626/washington-post-january-6-pardon

CNN Taking on Water

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Article in the Columbia Journalism Review by Betsy Morais, 1/24/25

Headline:  “The Flurry at CNN”

Subhead:  “A major network charts a digital course—and makes layoffs.”

“Washington weather report: “In a flurry of activity that is happening almost too swiftly to follow,” per CNN, “Trump is giving his critics every reason to think their worst fears for his new presidency will be realized and worse.” Back at CNN headquarters, there was other news in the air: a major restructuring that will cut about two hundred jobs focused on the company’s television programming and put about as many to work on digital products and services. “Recruiting the right people will take some time,” Mark Thompson, the CEO, wrote in a memo to the staff, “but we hope to open up and fill at least 100 new posts in the coming months to help execute the new plans.” He told the New York Times, “This is a moment where the digital story feels like an existential question. If we do not follow the audiences to the new platforms with real conviction and scale, our future prospects will not be good.”

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/cnn_digital_layoffs_mark_thompson.php

Media Overload

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Jon Alsop, 1/27/25

Headline:  “Too Much News, Redux”

Subhead:  “Trump floods the zone in his first week back in power.”

“Exhausted yet?” Last Thursday, The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser posed that question at the beginning of a column about the frantic pace of news generated in President Trump’s first half-week or so back in power, before reeling off a long list of major things he had done already, from pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord through the sweeping pardons for January 6 insurrectionists to his ‘pissing match’ with an Episcopalian bishop. Trump ‘loves to drown us in outrage,’ Glasser wrote. ‘The overwhelming volume is the point—too many simultaneous scandals and the system is so overloaded that it breaks down. It can’t focus.     It can’t fight back . . .’ ”

“. . . In the summer of 2020, toward the end of Trump’s last term in office, I wrote a column arguing that there was “too much news”—a joking refrain among exhausted journalists that was also literally true, in ways that limited the news media’s ability to cover major stories as extensively as they individually merited; such stories, I wrote, weren’t just coinciding randomly, but existed in ‘a messy ecosystem of cause, effect, suggestion, escalation, and acceleration,’ with one big story triggering another and so on. I wrote at the time that the pace of developments made the news cycle of 2018—which had felt ‘impossibly frenetic’ at the time—feel ‘quaint’ in hindsight . . .”

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/too-much-news-redux.php

No-joke Media

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Article in Fast Company by Zachary Petit

Headline:  ” ‘ I won the Pulitzer Prize and I’m busking on a corner’: 3 top artists on the uncertain future of political cartooning”

“Editorial cartoons and illustration are fairly niche topics—or so I once thought. On Jan. 3, cartoonist Ann Telnaes published Why I’m quitting the Washington Post on her Substack. It detailed how the paper—owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration—rejected her cartoon of Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong and Mickey Mouse worshipping at the president-elect’s feet with bags of money. The next day, the story was international news.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91262247/i-won-the-pulitzer-prize-and-im-busking-on-a-corner-3-top-artists-on-the-uncertain-future-of-political-cartooning?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

Peaceful Tourists Visit Media

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Article in Media Matters by Payton Armstrong & Jack Winstanley, 1/24/25

Headline:  “January 6 participants are touring right-wing media and calling for retribution following Trump’s pardon”

Subhead:  “Some say those who prosecuted the crimes should be “put behind bars” and face “extreme accountability”

Trump issued “full, complete and unconditional” pardons to January 6 participants, including “violent offenders,” and commuted the sentences of members of extremist groups who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy. According to The New York Times, “The pardons will also wipe the slate clean for violent offenders who went after the police on Jan. 6 with baseball bats, two-by-fours and bear spray and are serving prison terms, in some cases of more than a decade. ”

“. . . Right-wing media praised the move while glossing over pardons and commutations granted to those previously convicted of violent crimes or seditious conspiracy. On War Room, Steve Bannon celebrated “blanket” pardons. On Fox News, OutKick founder Clay Travis declared, ‘I love the pardon of the Jan 6 political prisoners.’ [Media Matters, 1/21/25; Real America’s Voice, War Room, 1/21/25; Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 1/21/25]

https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/january-6-participants-are-touring-right-wing-media-and-calling-retribution

Media Hiding Out Now?

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Article in The Nation by Jeet Heer, 1/24/25Headline:  “CNN Surrenders to Trump”

Headline:  “The corporate media’s commitment to fighting autocracy proves fickle.”

“US President Donald Trump points to journalist Jim Acosta from CNN during a postelection press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on November 7, 2018. ‘Will no one rid me of this troublesome journalist?’ (Jim Watson / AFP)

“CNN anchor Jim Acosta is fated to be a barometer of his network’s relationship with Donald Trump. During Trump’s first term, Acosta’s tough questioning at press conferences gave CNN credibility as a news outlet uncowed by the president’s bullying and willing to uphold the principle of accountability. In 2018, Trump denounced Acosta as a ‘rude, terrible person’ and the White House revoked Acosta’s press pass. CNN sued Trump and his top aides on behalf of Acosta, successfully forcing the White House to give the reporter back his press pass.

“If Acosta’s jousting with Trump was once celebrated by CNN, it has now become a source of shame. With Trump winning not just a second term but also having, for the first time, a popular vote victory (however narrow), CNN and other corporate media outlets have been thoroughly cowed.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/cnn-surrender-trump-corporate-media/

Saluting the Media?

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Daily Pakistan Photo

Article in Common Dreams by Pete Tucker, 1/24/25

Headline:  “Why Won’t the US Corporate Media Call a Nazi Salute a Nazi Salute?”

Subhead:  “The mainstream press failed to accurately describe the hand gesture that Elon Musk made twice at Trump’s Inauguration Day rally, setting a troubling precedent for the second Trump era.”

“There’s something about the start of a Trump presidency that makes grown men do strange things, like heiling Hitler.

“Eight years ago, after President Donald Trump’s first election, white nationalist Richard Spencer couldn’t resist flashing a Nazi salute as he addressed a rally just blocks from the White House (PBS, 11/22)”

“This time around, a more prominent Trump supporter gave a Nazi salute in a bigger forum. “I never imagined we would see the day when what appears to be a Heil Hitler salute would be made behind the presidential seal,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) wrote on Twitter/X (1/20/25).”

“. . .The Times story was headlined, “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture.”

“But speculation wasn’t needed. ‘Whoever on a political stage, making a political speech in front of a partly far-right audience, elongates his arm diagonally in the air both forcefully and repeatedly, is making a Hitler salute,’ wrote journalist Lenz Jacobsen. His story for the German newspaper Die Zeit (1/21/25) is headlined ‘A Hitler Salute Is a Hitler Salute Is a Hitler Salute.‘ ”

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/media-musk-nazi-salute